Architect Of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, Dies

ZAGREB, Croatia — Franjo Tudjman, the autocratic ex-general who led Croatia to independence but failed to bring full democracy or respectability to the new Balkan nation, died early Saturday.

The 77-year-old leader had been hospitalized since Nov. 1, and while details of his illness were shrouded in secrecy, it was widely understood that he had been battling some form of abdominal cancer since 1996.

The announcement of his death was made on state television at 2 a.m. local time and came as no surprise to the nation. Preparations for a huge state funeral have been in place for weeks.

The speaker of the parliament, Vlatko Pavletic, assumed the temporary powers of the presidency late last month after Tudjman lapsed into a coma, but the Croatian Constitution requires an election that would put a new president in place within 60 days.

An anxious struggle for succession has been churning beneath the surface of Croatian political life for weeks. Within the Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ, the nationalist party founded by Tudjman, several factions have emerged.

The HDZ has dominated Croatian politics since independence, but its grip has weakened and with Tudjman's departure opposition parties see a viable opening for themselves.

"President Tudjman was a great leader in a very specific time," said Foreign Minister Mate Granic, an HDZ member who is considered a strong presidential contender. "He had a very strong personality. Definitely in the future, there will be no one personality who has such a large influence on all spheres of life."

Tudjman liked to think of himself as the George Washington of Croatia, but Spanish diplomat Carlos Westendorp once told Tudjman that he would more likely be remembered as the Generalissimo Franco of Croatia unless he lightened his heavy hand and introduced more democratic reforms to his nation. Tudjman ignored the advice.

Although he craved respectability and desperately wanted his nation to become a full-fledged member of Europe, Croatia today remains on Europe's margins, a legacy of Tudjman's unwillingness to allow the return of hundreds of thousands of Serbs expelled during the war, his refusal to cooperate with the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague and his lack of interest in developing democratic institutions.

Tudjman and his wartime rival, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, will be linked in history as the politicians who doomed Yugoslavia to its violent breakup along ethnic fault lines.

"While history, particularly the carnage of World War II, provided plenty of tinder for ethnic hatred in Yugoslavia, it took the institutional nationalism of Milosevic and Tudjman to supply the torch," Warren Zimmerman, the last American ambassador to Yugoslavia, wrote in his memoirs.

Tudjman, however, proved himself a useful ally to several American administrations.

During the early 1990s, the U.S. and its allies turned a blind eye while Croatia evaded a UN arms embargo and built a modern, professional army. When the time came to use it, Tudjman made sure he had a green light from the U.S. His rout of Serb separatists on his own territory in the summer of 1995 and, soon after, his decisive backing of the Croat army in Bosnia-Herzegovina forced the Bosnian Serbs and their patron, Milosevic, to sue for peace at Dayton, Ohio.

But to the chagrin of the U.S., Tudjman's commitment to the Dayton accords and a multiethnic Bosnia was never more than lip service. The Croatian leader always believed that the Croat parts of Bosnia would eventually become part of Croatia.

"He leaves a mixed legacy," said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia who had extensive and often stormy dealings with the Croatian leader during the war years. "On the one hand, he was the architect of Croatia's independence. On the other, he never understood democratic practices; he never understood the culture of tolerance. His view toward other ethnic groups approached being racist."

Unlike Milosevic, Tudjman was no Johnny-come-lately to the volatile world of ethnic politics.

As a young man, he was a committed Marxist who fought bravely on the side of Marshal Tito's Partisans against the Nazis and their local proxies, the Croatian Ustashe regime. He rose through the ranks to become Tito's youngest peacetime general, but eventually soured on Yugoslav-style communism and became an ardent nationalist.

A self-styled historian after his retirement from the army in 1961, Tudjman busied himself cultivating contacts with the far-flung Croatian diaspora. He also wrote books that extolled the Croat nation while advancing a host of dubious racial theories.

He credits himself with shattering "the myth of Jasenovac," the terrible World War II concentration camp where the Ustashe put tens of thousands of Serbs and a lesser number of Jews to death. According to Tudjman, the numbers were exaggerated.

His nationalist leanings landed him in a Yugoslav prison for 10 months in 1971-72, and again for three years in the early 1980s.